Spare Us the False Choice: For the Oromo, PP and Fanno Are One and the Same
By Tsgeaye R Arrassa
September 24, 2026
For eight years now, the Oromo people have been subjected to a relentless campaign of violence, displacement, and terror. For eight years, they have watched as their cities were renamed, their lands confiscated, their communities torn apart, and their very identity demonized in the public square. And for eight years, they have been told—by the very forces orchestrating this suffering—that they must choose sides.
But what if the choice itself is a lie?
The central argument advanced by Tsgeaye R Arrassa in a recent and searing analysis is as urgent as it is uncomfortable: for the Oromo, there is no meaningful difference between the Prosperity Party (PP) and Faannoo. They are not adversaries. They are not even reluctant partners. They are, in essence, one and the same—extensions of a single political organism with a shared DNA, a shared roadmap, and a shared enemy.
The Architecture of a Shared Agenda
To understand the argument, one must first understand the historical context. Between 2018 and 2022, PP and Fanno operated in explicit collaboration and coordination. Together, they waged what Arrassa describes as a “genocidal war on Oromia,” employing a common modus operandi: war as politics, terror as method, and the destruction of a perceived ethno-national enemy as strategy. This was not a tactical marriage of convenience. It was a partnership born of ideological kinship.
Both forces, Arrassa argues, are “restorationists of the old Abyssinian empire (a la Kibre-Negest).” Both desire a return to the medieval politics of imperial glory. Both seek to undo the constitutional promise of self-determination and multinational democracy. Both view the Oromo—and other nations of Ethiopia—as their “unrelenting historical enemies.”
The evidence, he suggests, is hiding in plain sight. The National Dialogue Forum, ostensibly a platform for national consensus, became a vehicle for this shared restorationist agenda. When PP tabled anti-Oromo proposals—on the status of Finfinnee, on Dirree-Dhawaa, on a single “national” language, on the structure of regional administration—Fanno danced to the same soundbite. The agenda of constitutional revision was, according to Arrassa, “set, framed, and given to Abiy in 2018” by the very midwives of Fanno—figures like Andargatchew Tsige and Berhanu Negga, along with their organizational tentacles like NAMA and ECSJ. These architects of the anti-Oromo project now cohabit happily with the regime they once opposed.
When the Oromo and other marginalized nations rebuffed these imperial overtures within the Dialogue Commission, the response from both PP and Fanno was a shared—if variously bitter—disappointment. It was the frustration of partners whose common project had hit a wall, not of adversaries on opposite sides of a divide.
The Split That Wasn’t
The falling out between PP and Fanno, Arrassa contends, was never about principles. It was about Tigray—territorial claims and the Pretoria Ceasefire Agreement (PCA). “True to character, as partners in a seemingly continuous war pact, their relationship could not survive the ‘peace,'” he writes. After the PCA, Fanno found Abiy “indigestible” and stuck to their guns—literally.
But the campaign they launched against Abiy was never merely a political opposition. It was, and remains, “a thinly veiled genocidal and terrorist campaign against anything and everything Oromo.” The unfiltered anti-Oromo propaganda—hate speech, ethnic slurs, vilification, demonization—constitutes what Arrassa terms “stochastic terrorism.” Beyond the discursive violence, Fanno continues to foment a genocidal war campaign on the Oromo people, causing mayhem and chaos in East Wallagga, South-West and Southwest Shoa, and Gurage Zone.
The Oromo public, Arrassa insists, has no problem with alliances per se. He himself has been a lone voice calling for an “alliance for peace,” an alliance against a regime that “trades in war and does not seem to survive or thrive without war.” He worked closely with the movement for Solidarity of Nations and the United Front (2019-2022)—a coalition of national liberation fronts fighting for self-determination. That was not merely a tactical alliance. It was an alliance of national forces with clearly stated shared strategic interests: self-determination through a peaceful, just, democratic, and inclusive transitional arrangement. It was an alliance pegged on principles—substantive peace, transitional justice, collective and individual rights, democracy, equality, and solidarity.
The problem with the so-called “Alliance for Survival” is the “unconditional, unqualified admission of Fanno” into what would otherwise be a genuine alliance for peace. Fanno, like PP, is an “equally war-mongering and genocidal formation with overtly terrorist tactics.” It is a collective name for disparate armed formations with no political vision—no political program to date, save for a draft posted by a faction led by Eskinder Negga. They cannot articulate the end game post-Abiy. They are, Arrassa suggests, “rebels without cause.”
Yet because they are the only ones resisting the regime’s indiscriminate violence in Amhara-inhabited areas, they have become a rallying point for the disaffected, gaining a cloak of legitimacy and the appearance of a political formation.
The Terrorist Record
But that appearance, Arrassa argues, cannot obscure the reality. Fanno’s public statements, media reports, and protracted social media campaigns reveal a force with which the Oromo and other peoples of Ethiopia cannot ally. Their terrorist acts—beheading a young civilian, massacring women and children, burning farms, harvests, mills, and private properties, displacing Oromos in tens of thousands as part of ethnic cleansing projects—will “always stand between them and the Oromo public.”
At the very least, the Alliance should have demanded explanations for these tactics, this complicity in genocidal projects, this expansionist rhetoric, this anti-multinationalist, anti-federalist stance.
The Oromo public, Arrassa clarifies, understands that the PP regime is prosecuting a brutal and unnecessary war in the Amhara region. They denounce that war and stand in solidarity with the people of the region. But they cannot stand with an armed formation that continues to wage genocidal war on Oromos. They have questions. They demand explanations and apologies where due. They need to see pledges to desist from terrorist tactics, expansionist ambitions, and genocidal streaks—in both words and deeds.
Similarly, the Oromo understand the importance of an alliance for the Tigray people and the TPLF. They understand Tigray’s need for bilateral agreements to guard against besiegement. They stand in solidarity with their fight against a regime that committed genocide on them before and is committing it now. But they also want them to understand why they will not unconditionally stand with Fanno.
“Standing with Fanno is like formally inviting them and supporting them in their continuing genocidal war in Oromia,” Arrassa writes. “It is like supporting PP’s regime in its war against our people and the peoples beyond Oromia. For us, there is no difference between the two, as both are engaged in active genocidal wars against the Oromo.”
The Betrayal Within
Perhaps the most painful section of Arrassa’s analysis concerns the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and the individuals who have entered the Alliance in its name. He names them directly: Marroo Dirribaa and Jireenyaa Gudddataa. These individuals, he alleges, are “trying to get the legitimacy they have long lost in the army by seeking recognition from outside.”
For over a year, this group has severed its relationship with the commanders—the Executive Team, known as Gumii Shanee—and has been hiding from members who ask questions. Operating mostly from outside Oromia, they have been dividing and destabilizing the army, assassinating and marginalizing commanders who raise questions, conspiring with enemies (twice with the PP regime and for over a year with Fanno), and now joining Fanno to enable a new chapter of genocidal war on the Oromo people. The request by the leadership to hold a Congress, assess the situation, and correct mistakes fell on deaf ears.
The result is what we see now: “treasonous individuals forming an unprincipled alliance with Fanno in the name of OLA which the vast majority of the Oromo Liberation Army—I can say almost all except the stooges and assassins serving Marroo—is standing against.” The OLA considers this alliance a betrayal of the fundamental causes of the Oromo National Liberation Struggle. In fact, it views it as capitulation on the part of a so-called leadership that, after seeing the idea roundly rejected in the army and among the people, tried to accept the agreement but keep it hidden from the public—including by denying the existence of such an alliance just days before it became public through the reading of Zemene Kasse.
The False Choice and Its Consequences
The Alliance that was supposed to shorten the days of the PP regime, Arrassa concludes, is “probably contributing to the prolonging of the life of PP in power—if only unwittingly.” The people, disappointed by the mistake these individuals are making, seem to be drifting away by the day to support Abiy’s regime rather than the Alliance. This is happening despite the best efforts to call on the people to reject the false choice offered to the Oromo public—to side with either Fanno or PP.
For the Oromo and the peoples of the wider south, the two are one and the same, except for the difference in their current physical position. The choice before them is a false choice.
“Our task is to fight these forces wherever, whenever, until our peoples achieve the freedom they deserve.”
A Question of Principle
What emerges from Arrassa’s analysis is not merely a political argument but a moral one. It is a call to reject the seduction of false binaries—the notion that because one oppressor is marginally less immediately threatening than another, the oppressed must choose the lesser evil. For the Oromo, both PP and Fanno represent the same evil: the restoration of an imperial order that denies their very right to exist as a free and equal nation.
The Alliance for Survival, however well-intentioned some of its architects may be, has made a fatal error by admitting Fanno without conditions. It has lent legitimacy to a force that continues to wage genocidal war on the Oromo. It has asked the Oromo to stand with those who behead their children and burn their harvests. It has asked them to forget, to forgive, to pretend that the blood of their people is not on the hands of their new “allies.”
This, Arrassa insists, they cannot do. And they should not be asked to.
The beautiful ones, he reminds us, are not yet born. The struggle is long. But it must be waged on principles—not on the false choice between two faces of the same oppression.
Tsgeaye R Arrassa is a writer and political analyst focusing on the Horn of Africa, national liberation movements, and the politics of self-determination. He has been actively involved in movements for solidarity among nations and the formation of principled alliances against authoritarian rule.
